Iodine(III)-Mediated C-C Bond Coupling to Construct Spirocyclic Indolenines of Various Ring Sizes.

Herein, we report a novel iodine(III)-mediated intramolecular dearomative spirocyclization of indole derivatives to generate highly strained spirocyclobutyl, spirocyclopentyl, and spirocyclohexyl indolenines in moderate to good yields. A set of structurally novel, densely functionalized spiroindolenines with broad functional group compatibility was efficiently constructed in this way under mild reaction conditions. Moreover, the ß-enamine ester as a versatile functional group in the product provides great convenience for the synthesis of bioactive compounds and related natural products.

Capsaicin Functions as Drosophila Ovipositional Repellent and Causes Intestinal Dysplasia.

Plants generate a plethora of secondary compounds (toxins) that potently influence the breadth of the breeding niches of animals, including Drosophila. Capsaicin is an alkaloid irritant from hot chili peppers, and can act as a deterrent to affect animal behaviors, such as egg laying choice. However, the mechanism underlying this ovipositional avoidance remains unknown. Here, we report that Drosophila females exhibit a robust ovipositional aversion to capsaicin. First, we found that females were robustly repelled from laying eggs on capsaicin-containing sites. Second, genetic manipulations show that the ovipositional aversion to capsaicin is mediated by activation of nociceptive neurons expressing the painless gene. Finally, we found that capsaicin compromised the health and lifespan of flies through intestinal dysplasia and oxidative innate immunity. Overall, our study suggests that egg-laying sensation converts capsaicin into an aversive behavior for female Drosophila, mirroring an adaptation to facilitate the survival and fitness of both parents and offspring.

Accurate Hand Detection from Single-Color Images by Reconstructing Hand Appearances.

Hand detection is a crucial pre-processing procedure for many human hand related computer vision tasks, such as hand pose estimation, hand gesture recognition, human activity analysis, and so on. However, reliably detecting multiple hands from cluttering scenes remains to be a challenging task because of complex appearance diversities of dexterous human hands (e.g., different hand shapes, skin colors, illuminations, orientations, and scales, etc.) in color images. To tackle this problem, an accurate hand detection method is proposed to reliably detect multiple hands from a single color image using a hybrid detection/reconstruction convolutional neural networks (CNN) framework, in which regions of hands are detected and appearances of hands are reconstructed in parallel by sharing features extracted from a region proposal layer, and the proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, it is observed that the generative adversarial network (GAN) could further boost the detection performance by generating more realistic hand appearances. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on public challenging hand detection benchmarks.

[Expression of the MYL2 gene in the development of rat testis tissue].

OBJECTIVE: To study the expression of the gene of myosin regulatory light chain-2 (MYL2) in the development of rat testis tissue. METHODS: Using real-time PCR and immunohistochemistry, we determined the mRNA transcription level and protein expression of MYL2 in the rat testis. RESULTS: The mRNA expression of the MYL2 gene changed in an age-dependent manner, reaching the highest value on postnatal day (PND) 2, then dropped rapidly till PND 8, increased slowly on PNDs 10 and 12, decreased on PND 14, rose slightly from PND 15 and rapidly on PNDs 20 and 25, and declined slowly from PND 65. Immunohistochemistry showed that the MYL2 protein was mainly expressed in testicular sperm cells. CONCLUSIONS: The MYL2 gene may be involved in the proliferation of spermatogonial stem cells and the process of sperm cells developing into mature sperm.

Modelling saliency attention to predict eye direction by topological structure and earth mover's distance.

A saliency attention model for predicting eye direction is proposed in this paper. This work is inspired by the success of the topological structure and Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) approach. Firstly, we extract visual saliency features such as color contrast, intensity contrast, orientation, and texture. Then, we eliminate disconnected regions in the feature maps to keep topological structure. Secondly, we calculate center surround difference using across-scale EMD between different scales feature maps, rather than utilizing the Difference of Gaussian (DoG), which is used in many other saliency attention models. Thirdly, we across-scale fuse the feature maps in different scale and same feature. Lastly, we take advantage of competition function to calculate feature maps in same feature to form a saliency map, which is use to predict eye direction. Experimental results demonstrated the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art schemes in eye direction prediction community.